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The province Noord-Holland believes that they have made cultural heritage available to the greater public with their Street Museum app. Images of times gone-by are visualised at different location in seven regions (Alkmaar and surrounding areas, Amsterdam, Den Helder, Het Gooi region, Hoorn and the Zaanstreek).

The exhibition Gimme More ran from 21 February till 2 March 2013 at the Eyebeam Art + Technology Center in New York. The idea behind the exhibition was the way in which AR artworks highlights the relationship between physical and virtual reality.

He is often referred to as the “father of wearable computing,” Steve Mann. The Canadian researcher and inventor has over 35 years of experience in researching the various ways to add digital layers of information onto the physical world.

The Mobile Augmented Reality event will explore one of the most exciting aspects in mobile technology and promises to be a truly extraordinary opportunity for developers, artists, brands, agencies and industry. The Mobile Augmented Reality Conference is now part of The App Summit at International CTIA which will be held on 21 May 2013 at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

Is it difficult to picture how that chair from an interior design catalogue will look in your living room? With the AR app from Decolabs and twnkls users no longer need to picture it in their minds; they can decorate their homes with furniture from catalogues linked to the app.

Matt Mills from the start-up company Aurasma presented their AR application at TED. At the heart of the talk is the idea of an ‘aura’ which comes to light by linking digital content with something physical; for example, by visualising information about an object.

On The Wall Street Journal’s website the article “A Computer for Your Car’s Windshield” gives some insight into car manufacturers’ research on the practical application of AR. The idea is that manufacturers such as General Motors and Daimler will project relevant information onto a car’s windshield.

A research project conducted at Leiden University has been underway to produce glasses which will aid the hearing-impaired by displaying subtitles in real-time: SpraakZien (roughly translated as SeeingSpeech).

An interesting example of interactivity in museums with Snibbe Interactive. Create a "do-not-touch-free zone" for your visitors by engaging their senses of wonder and whimsy with an interactive exhibit themed to a specific museum for instance.

After having undergone lengthy renovation works, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam will be reopened in April 2013. The museum has not only digitized its collection; with Rijksstudio, the museum enables visitors to tap into their own creativity by ‘remixing’ artworks by Rembrandt for example.

We've been wondering when non-Googlers could get their hands on Project Glass in earnest, and now we know: the company is opening up pre-orders for Glass Explorer Edition, a developer version of its heads-up display glasses.

Google's Project Glass has been one of the most anticipated and hyped projects to come out of Google in quite some time. After a rather epic demo the company finally gave us a slightly deeper look at the wearable computer of our (supposed) future. Inside is the usual set of components you'd expect inside any mobile phone. There's a "powerful" CPU and "lots" of RAM (though, there was no mention of specifics) alongside an accelerometer, gyroscope and wireless radios for pulling in data. There's a mic for voice commands, a speaker and a camera, which can also be controlled by the touchpad that lines the side of the wearable device. All of those components sit off to one side, though Google says they're still well-balanced and actually lighter than some pairs of sunglasses. The tiny transparent display doesn't actually sit directly in front of your eye. It's slightly above your line of vision, so that it shouldn't interfere with your normal life.

Also Canon releases its new eye wear model
Big players are releasing all kind of solutions for eye-wear

This short blog-post give us a first image of their eye-wear.
An important difference between the various types is if the eye-wear is optical see-through or video see-through. This means one perceives the real world directly with your own eyes, or the real world is captured by video and mixed with the virtual content.

Another month, another augmented reality-related patent. And this time it is Microsoft’s turn again. If an augmented reality HUD is already a thing of the past (in terms of patent applications), the tech giant refocused their energy on what every AR experience should also have: a high quality 3D surround sound system.

So, imagine that you're Samsung, and you're looking to promote your double-SIMed Galaxy Y Duos smartphone. How to go about it? How about performing a cool light show on some dude's face? That's the approach of this spot brought to you by the Portugal wing of the hardware maker. The model in question reportedly had to sit still for "up to" three hours straight as his face and upper body were used as a canvas for the same sort of video mapping we've seen applied to the sides of buildings. The result is a little strange, a bit spooky and generally awesome, even if your Portuguese is a bit rusty. Check out the video after the break.

Viewer’s movement and expressions are mimicked by an animal’s head which is overlaid on the viewer’s reflection. The resulting effect invites inquiry into issues of self-awareness, empathy and non-verbal communication.

As rumors swirl around Google’s plans to announce head-up display glasses by the end of the year, the company has quietly begun advertising for a designer and engineer responsible for augmented-reality mapping.

'Steck' together your own readable QR-code! In this workshop you'll learn what QR-codes are, how they work, how they're used and most importantly, how you can make one in a fun analogue way. Since we are always trying to make connections between the online- and offline world, we found yet another nice way to connect the digital with the analogue. Try the QR Codes with the scanner on your mobile phone, and see for yourself that they really work.

Call for participation for the 11th IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR 2012): the symposium will be heldon Nov. 5 - 8, 2012 at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, USA. We invite you all to participate in this great event for the exchange of new ideas in this exciting field!

Project Paperclip is the first photographic exhibition to use Augmented Reality. The concept belongs to the Portuguese creative Nuno Serrão, and by including the auditory canal, it tries to transport visitors to a state that gives them a more profound interpretation of the photographs.

Augmented Reality Art
Artworks are on permanent display unless noted otherwise. To see them, you need to have installed the free Layar app on a smartphone (Android, or iPhone 3GS & higher), go to the artworks' locations, and then search for their names. See respective webpages for each exhibit for detailed instructions on locations and search terms.

The App Store is littered with augmented reality apps, and it’s with good reason. The idea of projecting a virtual world into our everyday lives feels magical to almost anyone. Couple this with the ease of Apple’s app store and it’s no wonder this genera of apps has been selling like hotcakes.

“Developing Apps for iOS 5″ is a New Free Online Class from Stanford University
November, 2011

Stanford University’s School of Engineering has released full HD videos and slides of their Fall 2011 “Developing Apps for iOS” course. The lectures and lessons for CS193P are focused on iOS 5 and downloadable for free from iTunes University, offering a great look at beginning iOS development through the eyes of a world class engineering school.

If you've ever worked in a library, you're familiar with the drudgery of shelf reading. That's the process of verifying that all the books on a shelf are in the right order, based on their call numbers. Books get out of order fairly easily, when they're taken off the shelf and examined, for example, or when they're just stuck in the wrong place.
Miami University's Augmented Reality Research Group (MU ARRG! - that exclamation point, I confess, is my addition), led by Professor Bo Brinkman, has developed an Android app that could save librarians a lot of time and hassle. Using the Android's camera, the app "reads" a bookshelf, and with an AR overlay, quickly flags those books that are misplaced. It will also point to the correct place on the bookshelf so the book can easily be re-shelved correctly.

According to the legend, Holger the Dane is sleeping in the casemates below Kronborg Castle and will only wake up if enemies threaten the Danish nation. But what happened to Holger the Dane before he fell asleep?

Visualize furniture in your own home using augmented reality. SnapShop gives you confidence that a sofa or chair looks great in your living room before you buy. Whether you're looking for a new couch, or just having fun coming up with ideas for a future remodel, SnapShop is the perfect tool to imagine how it might look and get feedback from friends.

Augmented reality leader Layar just took its system to a whole new level by installing a real-world object recognition protocol that's a little like Google's Goggles. In one swoop it may have turned AR apps from intriguing, inspiring, and occasionally useful toys into serious tools for information discovery and, of course, advertising. Let's call it hacking the real world.

Ideas to stand out in the crowd and to create awareness. To do things differently than other brands or competitors in your field. Gotanidea wants to put you on the map. With stunning social media and augmented reality concepts and original on- and offline campaigns.

Cultural Heritage is being digitalised by scanning.
An article in the Dutch magazine 'Science in Image' of June 2011, describes a huge project, named CyArk. The goal of the project is to scan cultural heritage sites and monuments. Very special: in this project the statues of Easter Island (Rapa Nui) are also being scanned.
These models are used for restaurations and for virtual 'visits' to the past.

The AR Summit: a UK conference designed to bring together the leading AR technology providers and earlier adopters of AR to share their experiences and successes though keynote presentations, discussion panels, case studies, Q&A alongside interactive and eye opening demonstrations.

The vOICe for Android application adds a sonic augmented reality overlay to the live camera view in real-time, thereby giving even completely blind people live and detailed information about their visual environment which they would otherwise not perceive. It may also serve as an interactive mobile learning app for teaching visual concepts to blind children. The vOICe for Android is a universal translator for mapping images to sounds.

This page discusses how The vOICe technology supports binocular vision with suitable stereoscopic camera hardware. In orientation and mobility applications for blind users, the orientation component is supported well by the standard single camera setup, but the mobility component can benefit from better depth and distance perception in order to detect nearby objects and obstacles. Binocular vision makes this possible, and will thus further enhance the applicability and versatility of The vOICe as an ETA (Electronic Travel Aid) for the blind in addition to its general vision substitution and synthetic vision features that realize augmented reality for the blind.

In the course “Blended Interaction”, Master’s students Michael Zöllner and Stephan Huber from Konstanz University /Universität (Germany)have been working on a very different approach to use the Microsoft Kinect. Since we liked their project so much and their helmet-mounted Kinect is such an eye-catcher (check out the video! J), we asked them to write about it for our blog. Here is what they wrote:

LookTel Money Reader instantly recognizes US currency and speaks the denomination, enabling people with visual impairments or blindness to quickly and easily identify and count bills. Simply point your iPhone's camera at any US bill and the application will tell you the denomination in real-time. It supports $1, $2, $5, $10, $20, $50, and $100 bills.

Digital Billboard: McDonald’s Turn Another Digital Billboard Into A Game To Win Free Food. This Time Using Mobile Web.
June, 9, 2011

You might remember the last McDonald’s interactive billboard campaign done in exactly the same spot last year. Well this time they’ve taken advantage of the advancement in mobile web (on some phones) to control a game of Pong on the billboard. If you manage to last 30 seconds against the computer, you win free food in the nearest McDonald’s restuarant nom nom nom.

We've been working with the team organising the Science Festival at the University of Cambridge to bring the front cover of their programme to life using Popcode.
Take a look at the University's news coverage here, check out their video from YouTube below, or visit the Science Festival Popcode page to view it with Popcode on your phone.

Apologies for not having posted substantive content this week. I spent most of the week in Santa Clara, California attending the second annual Augmented Reality Event. ARE2011 was a fantastic gathering of nearly all the active players in the entire AR industry, from the humblest startup to giants like Microsoft and Qualcomm. It featured dozens of speakers and an exhibit hall jam-packed with mind-blowing demonstrations of what’s to come.

Augmented Reality Tattoos and Copyright Law by Brian Wassom
May 8, 2011

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Augmented Reality Tattoos and Copyright Law
May 8, 2011 in Augmented Reality, IP with 1 Comment
Two completely unrelated stories broke in the past week that, when considered together, raise interesting questions for the augmented reality industry. (Just the sort of serendipity for which the blogosphere is designed!) The first was the news that the artist behind Mike Tyson’s facial tattoo had filed a copyright infringement suit against Warner Brothers for replicating the tattoo on one of the characters in the upcoming movie, “The Hangover Part 2.” And the guys at Freakonomics have opined that “he has a pretty good legal claim.”

“Take a picture; it’ll last longer.” Many times has that bit of sarcasm been directed at people who stare just a little too long. But suppose the guy is staring because he’s taking your picture? Text: Brian Wassom.

Overview
The Handy AR presents a vision-based user interface that tracks a user's outstretched hand to use it as the reference pattern for augmented reality (AR) inspection, providing a 6-DOF camera pose estimation from the tracked fingertip configuration. A hand pose model is constructed in a one-time calibration step by measuring the fingertip positions relative to each other in presence of ground-truth scale information. Through frame-by-frame reconstruction of the camera pose relative to the hand, we can stabilize 3D graphics annotations on top of the hand, allowing the user to inspect such virtual objects conveniently from different viewing angles in AR.

About
The digital world, i.e. our interaction with computer systems, becomes more and more connected with the physical world, i.e. our real-world activities and experiences. This changes the way we use technologies and opens up new opportunities for personalization and adaptation. People blog, post, chat, comment, tweet about things that matter to them: what they had for dinner, what their job activities were, what they thought about a particular television broadcast, et cetera. People share content about their activities, e.g. pictures taken at a concert, videos of business meetings, reports on business trips, personal stories. This abundant digital information stream has become an important backchannel in our daily lives. We constantly create digital traces about our experiences, which can be invaluable source for personalization.

Glasses-free 3D visualization is possible on the iPhone and iPad with a to-be-released application designed by french engineers of the laboratory of informatics of Grenoble. In the technology, the position of the user's head is tracked with the device's front-facing camera, creating a convincing 3D effect that alters the viewer's change in perspective.

During the Salone del Mobile in Milan in 2011, Droog will present furniture and accessories designed for download by EventArchitectuur and Minale-Maeda, including CNC cut tables, cupboards, desks, side tables, shelves, couches and 3D printed electrical outlets, flowers and charms.

Today Master students from Film and Photographic Studies visited the AR Lab.
One of the topics was the connections and the contrasts of Augmented Reality and Photography. We also had Bas Vroege from Paradox as a guest.